Fernandez de Piedrahita says that the Laches “worshipped every stone as a god, as they said they had all been men.” Arriaga tells us the Peruvians paid honour to “very large stones, saying that they were once men.” In the American Report of the Bureau of Ethnology for 1880, several stories are told of metamorphosis of men into stones from the Iroquois legends. According to Dorman, the Oneidas and Dakotahs claim descent from stones, to which they ascribe animation. An interesting intermediate form, which shows the growth of this idea, is given in Arriaga’s statement that the Marcayoc, or idol worshipped in Peru as the patron of the village, “is sometimes a stone and sometimes a mummy”: in other words, it depended upon circumstances whether they reverenced the body itself or the gravestone that covered it. Among the Coast Negroes, when a person dies, a stone is taken to a certain house—the village valhalla—to represent his ghost; and among the Bulloms, women “make occasional sacrifices and offerings of rice to the stones which are preserved in memory of the dead.” At Tanna, in the New Hebrides, Mr. Gray, a missionary, found “a piece of sacred ground, on which were deposited the stones in which they supposed the spirits of their departed relatives to reside”; and Commander Henderson, commenting upon a similar case from Vati Island, says these “were the only form of gods the natives possessed, and into them they supposed the souls of their departed friends and relatives to enter.” Some of them “had a small piece chipped out on one side, by means of which the indwelling ghost or spirit was supposed to have ingress or egress.” Of a third sort, rudely fashioned by hand, Captain Henderson says acutely, “these, it seemed to me, were the beginnings of a graven image—a common stone, sacred as the dwelling-place of an ancestral ghost.” *
* I owe this and several other references to Mr. Spencer’s
Appendix, as I do some of my previously cited cases to Mr.
Lang or Dr. Tylor.
Classical and Hebrew literature are full of examples of such stones, believed to have been once human. Niobe and Lot’s wife are instances that will at once occur to every reader. In Boeotia, Pausanias tells us, people believed Alkmene, the mother of Herakles, was changed into a stone. Perseus and the Gorgon’s head is another example, paralleled by the Breton idea that their great stone circles were people, who, in the modern Christianised version of the story, were turned into stone for dancing on a Sunday. (About this Christianisation I shall have a word to say further on; meanwhile, observe the similar name of the Giant’s Dance given to the great Stonehenge of Ireland.) In the same way there is a Standing Rock on the upper Missouri which parallels the story of Niobe—it was once a woman, who became petrified with grief when her husband took a second wife. Some Samoan gods (or ancestral ghosts) “were changed into stones,” says Mr. Turner, “and now stand up in a rocky part of the lagoon on the north side of Upolu.”
On the other hand, if men become stones, stones also become men, or at least give birth to men. We get a good instance of this in the legend of Deucalion. Again, by the roadside, near the city of the Panopoeans, lay the stones out of which Prometheus made men. Manke, the first man in Mitchell Island, came out of a stone. The inhabitants of the New Hebrides say that “the human race sprang from stones and the earth.” On Francis Island, says Mr. Turner, “close by the temple there was a seven-feet-long beach sandstone slab erected, before which offerings were laid as the people united for prayer”; and the natives here told him that one of their gods had made stones become men. “In Melanesia,” says Mr. Lang, “matters are so mixed that it is not easy to decide whether a worshipful stone is the dwelling of a dead man’s soul, or is of spiritual merit in itself, or whether the stone is the spirit’s outward part or organ.” And, indeed, a sort of general confusion between the stone, the ghost, the ancestor, and the god, at last pervades the mind of the stone-worshipper everywhere. “The curious anthropomorphic idea of stones being husbands and wives, and even having children,” as Dr. Tylor calls it—an idea familiar to the Fijians as to the Peruvians and Lapps—is surely explicable at once by the existence of headstones either to men or women, and the confusion between the mark and the ghost it commemorates.
An interesting side-point in this gradual mixing up of the ghost and the stone, the god and the image, is shown in a gradual change of detail as to the mode of making offerings at the tomb or shrine. On the great trilithon in Tonga, Miss Gordon-Cumming tells us, a bowl of kava was placed on a horizontal stone. Here it must have been supposed that the ghost itself issued forth (perhaps by night) to drink it, as the serpent which represented the spirit of Anchises glided from the tomb to lick up the offerings presented by Æneas. Gradually, however, as the stone and the ghost get more closely connected in idea the offering is made to the monument itself; though in the earlier stages the convenience of using the flat altar-stone (wherever such exists) as a place of sacrifice for victims probably masks the transition even to the worshippers themselves. Dr. Wise saw in the Himalayas a group of stones “erected to the memory of the petty Rajahs of Kolam,” where “some fifty or sixty unfortunate women sacrificed themselves.” The blood, in particular, is offered up to the ghost; and “the cup-hollows which have been found in menhirs and dolmens,” says Captain Conder, “are the indications of the libations, often of human blood, once poured on these stones by heathen worshippers.” “Cups are often found,” says a good Scotch observer, “on stones connected with the monuments of the dead, such as on the covering stones of kistvaens, particularly those of the short or rarest form; on the flat stones of cromlechs; and on stones of chambered graves.” On the top of the cairn at Glen Urquhart, on Loch Ness, is an oblong mass of slate-stone, obviously sepulchral, and marked with very numerous cups. When the stones are upright the notion of offering the blood to the upper part, which represents the face or mouth, becomes very natural, and forms a distinct step in the process of anthropomorphisation of the headstone into the idol.
We get two stages of this evolution side by side in the two deities of the Samoyed travelling ark-sledge, “one with a stone head, the other a mere black stone, both dressed in green robes with red lappets, and both smeared with sacrificial blood.” In the Indian groups of standing stones, representing the Five Pandavas, “it is a usual practice,” says Dr. Tylor, “to daub each stone with red paint, forming, as it were, a great blood-spot where the face would be if it were a shaped idol.” Mr. Spencer, I think, hits the key-note of this practice in an instructive passage. “A Dakotah,” he says, “before praying to a stone for succour paints it with some red pigment, such as red ochre. Now, when we read that along with offerings of milk, honey, fruit, flour, etc., the Bodo and Dhimals offer ‘red lead or cochineal,’ we may suspect that these three colouring matters, having red as their common character, are substitutes for blood. The supposed resident ghost was at first propitiated by anointing the stone with human blood; and then, in default of this, red pigment was used, ghosts and gods being supposed by primitive men to be easily deceived by shams.” It is possible, too, that with the process of idealisation and spiritualisation it might be supposed a substitute would please the gods equally well, or that redness generally was the equivalent of blood, in the same way as the Chinese burn paper money and utensils to set free their ghosts for the use of ancestral spirits.
In any case, it is interesting to note that the faces of many Hindu gods are habitually painted red. And that this is the survival of the same ancient custom we see in the case of Shashti, protectress of children, whose proper representative is “a rough stone as big as a man’s head, smeared with red paint, and set at the foot of the sacred vata-tree.” Like customs survived in Greece down to the classical period. “The faces of the ancient gilded Dionysi at Corinth,” says Mr. Lang, quoting Pausanias, “were smudged all over with cinnabar, like fetish-stones in India or Africa.” In early South Italy, too, the Priapus-Hermes, who protected the fields, had his face similarly “daubed with minium.” Is it possible to dissever these facts from the cannibal banquets of the Aztec gods, where the images had lumps of palpitating human flesh thrust into their lips, and where their faces were smeared with the warm blood of the helpless victims?
Only in one instance, however, have I been able to trace the custom of painting with red directly back to cannibalism, and that is among the man-eaters of the New Hebrides, where, when a man died, and his body was laid out in a piece of thick native cloth, “the face was kept exposed and painted red.” I believe with this practice must ultimately be correlated the red-painted faces of the Corinthian Dionysi.
Another point of considerable interest and importance in the evolution of stone worship is connected with the migration of sacred stones. When the Israelites left Egypt, according to the narrative in Exodus, they carried the bones of Joseph with them. When Rachel left her father’s tent she stole the family teraphim to accompany her on her wanderings. When Æneas flew from burning Troy, he bore away to his ships his country’s gods, his Lares and Penates. All of these tales, no doubt, are equally unhistorical, but they represent what, to the people who framed the legends, seemed perfectly natural and probable conduct. Just in the same way, when stone-worshippers migrate from one country to another, they are likely to carry with them their sacred stones, or at least the most portable or holiest of the number.
Here is a very good illustrative case, once more from that most valuable storehouse, Turner’s Samoa. The Fijian gods and goddesses we saw, according to Tylor, “had their abodes or shrines in black stones like smooth round millstones, and there received their offerings of food.” But on a certain Samoan island, says Mr. Turner, “In a district said to have been early populated by settlers from Fiji, a number of fancy Fijian stones were kept in a temple, and worshipped in time of war. The priest, in consulting them, built them up in the form of a wall, and then watched to see how they fell. If they fell to the westward, it was a sign that the enemy there was to be driven; but if they fell to eastward, that was a warning of defeat, and delay in making an attack was ordered accordingly.”